If you write 400 words, you’ll end up with 1 and 3/5 pages double spaced.
Imagine this scenario. You’re a high school student writing a personal essay for a college application. The application instructs you to fit your answer into a form field that only allows for 400 words. You’d rather complete your essay writing in a word processor, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs, so that you can take advantage of spell check and other review functions. Here’s the question: How many pages do you need to write in total?
To get an idea of how many pages you’ll need to write, we recommend working with Arial font or Times New Roman in a 12-point font size. Choosing a standard font will make it easier for you to convert word count to page count. Of course, you can choose something more exotic, such as Calibri or Verdana; however, with those fonts the conversion chart below may prove to be less precise.
Since you’ve been given a word count, you know that your personal essay will need to be shorter than 400 words. Using the chart below, you can see that the same number of words may result in a different page count, depending on the line spacing you select in your word processor. A 400-word count essay would result in 4/5 of a page with single spacing and 1 and 3/5 pages with double spacing. If you’ve completed your personal essay with double space formatting, it should be shorter than 1 and 3/5 pages in order to fit in the application form field.
Of course, you can imagine that the content of your essay may influence the page count. If you’re talking about your childhood move from Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, Wales to Fuerstenfeldbruck, Germany, repeating the lengthy town names may take up more space. That 400-word essay could end up becoming a full page, single spaced. Converting words to pages is not an exact science, so we can’t give a definitive answer about how many pages you’ll need. The words and the type of font you choose may influence the page count, but, luckily, they won’t change the number of words you’ve written.
Here’s the good news: Most word processors contain a word counter that allows you to check the word count and character count, enabling you to be precise. Also, if your writing is going to end up going into an online form, you don’t have to worry too much about formatting. You can work with 1-inch margins or 2-inch margins. It won’t matter, since you’ll end up pasting it into the online form.
Still, if you’d like to estimate the number of pages you need to write, it’s easy to get a fair idea. As a good rule of thumb, use this chart to approximate the number of pages you’ll get for a particular amount of words.
If you’d like to know how to convert a speech from pages to minutes, check out this article.
